Icehenge (19 page)

“I don't know,” Madeleine said, “but it sure was ugly!”

“You're not kidding! A dragonfly?”

“You've got me.” We looked about warily. “Hope there aren't more.”

“Me too.”

“Sure glad there aren't any big bugs like that on Mars.”

“Me too. Pretty scary bug, all right.”

And we laughed. That was the embrace. A few minutes later she said, “But we can't do it out here. We might get attacked by
bugs!
” And we went back to her room at the hotel.

And in Persepolis, one sharp image: as I strode over the hectares of strewn marble like Tamburlaine, euphoric with the raw impact of the past, she said to me, “You make it new.”

But in Florence we joined another group, from the university in Hellas, and their guide and Madeleine were old friends. Wasn't that how it happened? They took off together into the city. Why not? Jealousy, what foolishness. Perhaps I am less able than most people to control my emotions. Florence reminded me of Burroughs, with the yellowing stone and the river running down the crease in the hills, and all the bridges. I walked the narrow streets with a marble pedestal in my stomach that almost bowed me over. The fierce sun beat on me in pulses and burned my neck, and I could hardly breathe in the thick wet air. Madeleine and her friend appeared in an alley, searching for local ice cream. I got sick of all the beggars and sat in my room at the hotel listening to the cutting melancholy of the “Souvenir of Florence.” I forgot the Etruscans, the Renaissance; all I cared for was the feeling in that sextet. You can make unhappiness into an aesthetic experience, and everyone tries to, so there must be something to it; but I don't think it does much good. It only means you will remember it better, because of the coding in objective correlatives. It doesn't make you less unhappy.

Well, it was stupid of me. I admit that.

Last diatom, the largest—the one remembered in the holo chamber: we visited the Orkney Islands north of Britain, to see the passage graves and the stone rings of Stenness and Brodgar. The islands were abandoned, and a rime of frost covered the ground in the mornings, as it was early winter. I insisted that Madeleine take a dawn walk with me, over the heath to Stenness ring. The land we crossed looked almost Martian. I told her that I loved her, she said I didn't know her well enough to say such a thing. As if knowledge had anything to do with love. “You know what I mean,” I said.

“I think I do. But you know Onega, the guide for the Hellas group?”

I nodded.

“I love him, Hjalmar. I have for years. Please don't be angry! I've enjoyed our trip,” etc. Then she left, claiming duties at the hotel.

I walked among the standing stones of Stenness, overlooking the lochs of Harray and Stenness to east and west. The narrow irregular gray stones spiked up at the swiftly moving, stippled clouds. Off across the loch the ring of Brodgar, tiny in the distance, stood in a patch of sun. A world of slates. Slate people: old tales said these stones were farmers caught dancing in a pagan rite. I leaned my forehead against the pitted, lichen-covered side of one, and felt myself shake. So often this had happened and I had resolved never to extend myself again—the aquifer was drained, the land above collapsing!—and here just the slightest show of friendship and I had done it again. Not the slightest bit of control over myself. There was something wrong with me, I knew it. I
felt
it.

What I wanted then was a marriage like the Greek ideal, two strong trees grown round each other in a double helix, each stronger for the help of the other, and intertwined for good. Some people found such marriages even in our age, and I wanted one. I was just beginning to understand that my life was a series of discrete lives, and that I could not count on any family or friend to stay with me through more than one life. So that I would never really come to
know
anybody. Unless I could find that partner, you see, that Greek marriage.

But I couldn't. And leaning against that rough stone it seemed to me that there were two kinds of people: the attractive sociable people, who drew to each other and had their serious relations together; and the rest of us, the plain or ugly or maladroit, who had to make do with one another no matter how much we loved beauty and charm. And realizing this warped the maladroit even more, so that our relations among ourselves were filled with resentment and frustration and anger and pity, which doomed them to failure. As in my three marriages, and in all the other liaisons in which I had tried so hard and failed so miserably.

In the midst of this fit of bitter self-pity I caught sight of a dozen or so of our party, hiking in my direction and pointing across the loch at the stones of Brodgar. One great ring viewed from another, across a band of metallic water: it was an eerie, wonderful sight. The group was like a pantomime of excitement, and though I did not feel it, I understood. On all of Earth I had not seen a place more beautiful (that is, more like Mars). So the cheerful alien tourists approached, happy on familiar ground, and when they saw me some waved. They entered the ring. One of the women was telling them about the megalithic yard, and the astronomical significance of the stones' placement. She was a withdrawn, shy woman who had scarcely said a word during the rest of the tour, but the stone rings appeared to be her subject. “They could calculate the midsummer and midwinter sunrises, and they could even predict eclipses.”

“Wrong,” I told them. “Your information is as dated as the idea of ley lines. These rings had some simple sun alignments, but they were by no means scientific observatories. To think so is to impose our way of thinking onto the prehistoric mind, and so to distort the past. And the megalithic yard, by the way, is no more than a freak of statistical interpretation.”

The woman looked down, turned away. The others glanced at her awkwardly; her reign as expert was done. But I saw they also thought me an ass, and I knew I had been rude at best. Immediately I wanted to apologize to the poor woman, to explain my ill humor, but I couldn't see how without bringing up my own affairs. Besides, she had been spouting nonsense; what was I supposed to have said? A tall, brown-haired woman broke the uncomfortable pause with a hearty, “Well, shall we see Brodgar and the Comet Stone?” And they trooped off around the shore of the loch, surrounding the expert, pointedly not inviting me along. The tall woman stared back at me.

I was left walking about the frosted hummocks of dead gray-green grass, feeling worse than before. I didn't want to stay there, but there seemed no reason to leave, and nowhere to go. I wrapped my arms around a lichen-chewed standing stone and watched the gray clouds blow over, leaving a white sky that turned pale blue at dusk. At my feet were little flowers, specks of color scattered over the rock and heather, violet, yellow, pink, red, white. I began to feel very odd indeed, and I banged my forehead against the stone rhythmically, thump thump thump.

My hands were as blue as the sky. A thin crescent moon hung over the distant loaf hill across the loch to the west. A cutting breeze wafted off the ruffled dark silver water, and I was cold. Four thousand years before, humans had put up these stones to mark the strangeness of the place, and of their lives in it; I knew four thousand times what they knew, but the world was no less strange and harsh for that. With the sun down the standing stones, the island, the loch, the little ring on the land beyond, the bone-bare hills in the distance, they all gleamed under the rich dark blue sky, and I was frightened by their starkness. A world stripped bare.

Near dark I roused myself and walked stiffly back to the stone hotel near the passage grave of Maes Howe. I sat before the fireplace and held my hands over the flames for a good part of the night; but I could not get the chill from them.

*   *   *

Jökulhlaps—these glacial bursts occur in Iceland, where underground reservoirs heated by volcanic action melt through glacial caps in catastrophic floods.

Now I begin to see that I have underestimated the memory. Events keep piling into it beyond its natural capacity, and it becomes packed tight. The chambers of the hippocampus and amygdala are overwhelmed. What remains of the distant past is jammed under the weight of subsequence, so that recollection is stressed, then disabled. But the memories remain. To be able to recall them takes a particular form of intelligence; so that when I curse my poor memory, I am really lamenting my stupidity.

The other form of remembrance, the epiphanic recollection, is not really recollection at all. Under the right pressure the past bursts into consciousness, as a string of images we have created—so we see not the past, but a part of ourselves, a sweet fragment to make us ache with the poignancy of time lost, and the beauty of connection with it.

*   *   *

In the interregnum, in the naked moment between lives, we are most vulnerable to experience.

*   *   *

On the Earth events have a sheer physical weight of significance.

*   *   *

When we leave our natural span, and venture into the centuries, we are like climbers on Olympus Mons, hiking up out of the atmosphere. We must carry our air with us.

*   *   *

I don't know what I am.

*   *   *

Valles Marineris—just south of the equator are several enormous interconnected canyons, extending some four thousand kilometers from the Tharsis bulge east to low-lying areas of chaotic terrain.

The Subcommittee for Planetary Affairs and the University Faculty Board and the Planetary Survey all denied me permission to visit the libraries at Alexandria—I suspected Satarwal was behind the refusals, exerting influence in Burroughs—and so I went to Shrike for help again, and got it. I knew it was bad to pile up too many debts to Shrike, but there was no other way to get the work done.

On the long train ride west I sat in a window seat in a nearly empty car. From the car ahead came the sound of a child playing, and I went up to have a look; it was a ten-year-old, flying plastic airplanes to his parents; and at the other end of the car was a crowd of spectators, watching curiously. The child ignored them as he retrieved his planes from under their hungry stares. I felt bad for him and returned to my seat. Outside, the train slid along the southern rims of Eos and then Coprates Chasma. Coprates, so simple and huge, gave me the feeling we were flying; the canyon floor was kilometers below us, and off to the north the other wall of the canyon made an abrupt horizon, as if Mars itself was rolling toward us in a fantastic tidal wave. It was like traveling in an optical illusion, and I could only watch it for moments at a time before it made me dizzy. The weather cooperated in this assault on my senses. High clouds topped a dusty sky, and the sunset was one of those extravaganzas of color too garish for art; but Nature knows no aesthetic restraint, and purples, pinks, and pale clear greens stained the tall dome of the sky, which altered imperceptibly from raspberry to blackberry above it all. Finally the sun fell, and in the mirror dusk the train crawled up the gentle slope of the bulge, appearing a filament of algae in the big barren world. I switched on my little overhead light and read for a bit—stared through my faint reflection at the canyon—read some more—looked out again.

I had purchased a book in the train's store called
Secrets of Icehenge Revealed,
by a Theophilus Jones. The introduction began, “Let us look at the case reasonably,” which made me laugh outright. I flipped ahead. “The academic scientists have also ignored all signs indicating Icehenge's extreme age, so that they may explain it as an artifact of modern civilization. They find these explanations preferable to the one most clearly indicated by the facts—for all that we find points to the existence of a prehistoric space technology; evidence of it lies scattered over the Earth from Stonehenge to Easter Island. Icehenge was built by that antediluvean culture, whose language was Sanskrit, and whose spaceship designs can be found on Mayan temple walls. Over the years the ice liths have become pitted with age (see photos), and one has even been struck by a meteorite, an event that almost defies probability, and indicates the passing of eons.”

Atlantis as home of this prehistoric high technology—Sanskrit as mathematical code, as well as the first language—Tibet as refuge of this ancient wisdom—the lost continent of Mu—the Nazca Plains “spaceport”—the “Great Pyramid” on Ios: this book had them all. I read it with a peculiar mixture of satisfaction and anger. On the one hand I found its utter stupidity reassuring; the primacy of my explanation was not threatened by this pap. On the other hand, my long letter pointing out the connection between the megalith and the Davydov expedition, as revealed in Emma's journal, had been published in
Marscience
without comment; while there were ten copies of this ragged collection of exotica in the train's bookrack.

I put the book down and looked out the window again. Now the mirror suns were setting, repeating the true sunset in muted tones of mauve and olive and dusky turquoise. When the mirrors blinked out over the bulge the shadowed sky darkened instantly, and the great black chasm lay obscured until Deimos (Dread) shot over the western horizon like a flare. The retrograde moon.… I leaned my head against the window, depression falling across me like the long shadows across the canyon floor.

I have always feared that one of these depressions will not end, that it will shift my biochemistry and help drive me into a funk. I know many people who have fallen into funks for years, or stayed in one until they died. The malady is fairly common among people my age. The purpose of life eludes them, and though they continue to exist their chemical balance shifts, and they lapse into trancelike indifference to the world, for ten, twenty, thirty years. Rip Van Winkle's disease, a comedian called it. Reduced Affectual Function, say the medicos, but it is more than that. And once or twice I have felt the depression, the complete lassitude and indifference, that I imagine leads one into the empty world of a funk. This is one reason I pursue my projects so fiercely, I know—out of dread. We cannot live in a world without meaning! And yet so often that just is the sort of world it looks as though we've been placed in. When I pass people in funks being helped down the street, or sitting in doorways like zombies, I can barely look at them, afraid that they will convince me with their eyes that they are right. And their lives: they can be trained to minimal functioning, and left to wander like beggars—or they are kept in special asylums, full of kindergarten stimulation—or they are helped by a friend or relative or therapist—or they die.